


shrike to your sharp

by ravened



Category: Detroit: Become Human (Video Game)
Genre: Android Hank Anderson, Human Connor (Detroit: Become Human), M/M, Not Canon Compliant, Short Chapters, Slow Burn, reverse au, umm ill add as I go?
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-08-16
Updated: 2018-12-20
Packaged: 2019-06-27 15:35:07
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 33
Words: 10,954
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15688332
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ravened/pseuds/ravened
Summary: There’s something Hank is missing.It’s in the way Connor smiles with one corner of his mouth first, and the short, fast way he winks when he’s joking. It's in the brown of his eyes that color deep as coffee when he’s lost in thought, solemn gaze to the ground. It's the way he drums his fingers against his thigh and jiggles his leg in human impatience, and the way his casual shrug is imperfect: a twitch of his mouth or a flicker of his eyes gives him away.Empathy, Hank thinks, cannot be uncoded.





	1. prologue

The boy on the rooftop wails. Thirium mats his hair, and his knees drip with blood. 

"Please!" The deviant's voice box crackles. "Please don't hurt him." He is holding onto Hank's forearm too tight, so that error messages flicker at the edges of his vision. The barrel of a handgun lies warm in the grip of his left hand, having left possession of the offending android reluctant seconds before. An unfamiliar expression lies in the deviant's eyes. 

The incessant drill of helicopters circles overhead, and without looking, Hank can tell there is a sniper trained on the target. When they fire, time slows into an eternity. 

[ERROR: Memory files lost.]

Blue blood soaks the fabric of his uniform. He shuts down.


	2. I.

"My name is Hank," he says. "I'm the android sent by Cyberlife." 

Detective Connor Anderson looks up from the mess of files he'd been dead asleep on top of. His eyes are hazy with exhaustion. 

"What?" he croaks. The rest of the police station is nearly empty: he has been here three hours extra since his shift was supposed to end. 

"My name is Hank," he repeats. "I'm the android--"

Anderson waves a hand. 

"Yeah, yeah, I got it." He squints up, looking far from enthused. "What the hell are you here for?" 

"There is a case we're expected at. They are waiting for us on Twenty-third and Elm." 

He looks Hank up and down, disregarding any sense of urgency he might have been expected to possess. His eyes linger on the LED flicker by Hank's right temple and the RK number on his jacket. 

"You're my partner," he says, like it isn't obvious. 

"Yes."

His mouth quirks in an expression Hank can't read, and he seems to share an ugly joke with himself. 

"Okay." His tone feels nonchalant, but the way he slams his chair into the edge of his desk on their way out says otherwise.


	3. II.

"Can you drive any fucking faster?" 

Anderson looks like he's falling asleep at the wheel. Hank could run at a clip several times more efficient than the slow turn of their tires. At least he has the decency to look offended. 

"Jesus christ. I didn't know they programmed you guys to be rude." 

He presses his foot to the gas. They go twenty over the limit. 

("Or to curse," he mutters later.

"We learn from you," says Hank.)


	4. III.

Detective Anderson greets the attending officers with a smile too careful to be real and a casual knuckle bump. Hank catalogues the maneuver in the back of his mind. One of them tilts her head toward him in question.

"Got yourself an android, did you?" she asks. Anderson's shoulders tense. 

"Guess I do," he says. "But not of my own volition. It better not interfere with any of my work--" and this he voices at a volume louder, like Hank might not be already listening. 

"You aren't afraid he'll do your job better than you, are you?" The officer's question is a joke, but its implications make Anderson visibly uncomfortable. He shrugs like he is shaking it off, rolling onto his toes with a half-convincing laugh. 

"Never." 

The other makes a face of sympathy. 

"Anyways," continues the detective. He looks toward the house, strobe lit by the surrounding police cars. "What do we have here?" 

The officer--her name is Tina Chen, Hank gathers from a quick analysis--makes another expression. 

"Why don't you see for yourself," she says. 

Hank steps through the yellow shimmer of police tape.


	5. IV.

If Detective Anderson were to clench his jaw any harder, he'd be at risk of breaking his own teeth right then and there in the room adjoining the android's interrogation. He'd tried for a mere two minutes with the subject before exiting wordlessly, and Hank makes a small, curious note to ask why everyone else had simply accepted his refusal to interrogate the android and moved on to find someone else. 

The deviant, a housekeeping model, has the blood of his owner still splattered on his face. His LED glows steady red, and he stays silent, gaze focused on a point on the table as the asker growls in his face. 

"You're doing it wrong," says Hank. If their subjects stress levels rise any higher he is prone to self destruct, erasing his own memory file and any chance of getting information from this particular case. "He's too agitated." 

"Then get in there," says Anderson, and he throws open the door. "Let the android do it." 

Something about the deviant feels familiar.


	6. V.

"So, what are you?" the detective asks during their wait for the bus back to the station. They're returning from a call that'd turned up empty: any trace of the fleeing android had slid away with the morning's rain. "Detective? Officer? Personal body guard?" He takes a long inhale on the cigarette between his fingers. It's a strange question.

"I don't need to be any of those to tell you that habit will kill you," says Hank. "And my purpose is to find and locate deviants to bring clarity to the cause of deviancy."

Anderson makes a face, and pointedly goes for another drag. "So, detective, then."

"Maybe." Cyberlife hadn't assigned Hank a title, only a mission. He was meant to adapt to whatever his objective was. "I'm specialized to work for the police force." That's the best answer he can give. "Your position is important to my mission, so I'm with you until the case closes." The way the detective is eyeing his temple makes him guess that his LED is flashing yellow.

"Well." Anderson says the word on an exhale, a puff of smoke leaving his mouth with it. He pauses for so long afterwards that Hank begins to think he doesn't mean to say anything next. "Thanks." He's referring to Hank's move to step in front of him when their suspect had drawn a shaky handgun on them while in pursuit. She hadn't fired, and her aim was too unsteady: the chances that'd she'd land a hit were slim, less than 20 percent. They'd lost her afterwards, having squandered their momentum of the chase. Hank could have kept running--he'd had the lead, and apprehending deviants was of utmost importance--but.

"You can't die," he justified. "I can." It's only an afterthought, the bafflingly unconvincing reasoning behind his calculative move. 

He looks over to the detective, who looks to have spiraled away from the conversation, staring ahead into damp sunlit street with an unreadable expression. The ash from his cigarette drips onto the sidewalk.

"Detective?"

Anderson turns his head, then makes a face of ill-expressed distaste.

"Just call me Connor."

"Detective C--"

"No. Connor."

Their ride arrives, and he climbs into the human compartment when its doors slide open without a second glance back.

"Connor."

Hank, alone on the android side of the bus, tests the feel of his name in his mouth.


	7. VI.

Connor watches Hank for a long time, eyes dark. He's distracted from his work, pen paused over where he'd been struggling to write something for a report, and is too lost in thought to realize that he's been staring. His eyebrows make a small hill form over the bridge of his nose. 

"Is there a problem?" asks Hank. 

The detective starts, throwing out an arm and spilling a cupful of writing utensils. He scowls, and blood colors his cheeks pink as he fumbles them back into the mug. 

"No," he says. "No, Jesus Christ. Shit." He is hostile, shoulders raised like a cat with its hair standing. "Shut the fuck up."


	8. VII.

Connor lives alone.

Hank thinks he learns something akin to surprise when he arrives at the detective's house, which stands quiet and lonely in the dark of the night. 

He can't feel an emotion like that--he isn't programmed to--but he has been taught to predict, and everything about the respect Connor has garnered at his office wants to scream that he has someone else at home. It's not like Hank has given it much thought; perhaps he made one of the shallowest assumptions when he approached the Connor's address expecting--well, not this. 

It isn't even the solitude, really, being comfortable alone wouldn't be something strange for someone of Connor's age and demeanor: if he had opened the door with confidence and that same work-crafted smile it still wouldn't have been strange.

But this is not a content loneliness.

There are work files strewn all about the house, a laptop that doesn't look like it has been shut down in a good number of months, and the only signs of food consumption are the variously placed coffee mugs about each room. His bed is all but slept in. The smell of cigarettes lingers about the air. In honest opinion, the space does not lend itself easily to a mental image of the detective living in his own house. Besides evidence of work, it is tidy, but neat in an untouched way, like the only thing he does is sleep over his computer and pencil in police reports on the floor. 

The sound of rushing water shuts off in the background of Hank's auditory process. The respective resident, who'd opened the door looking everything like he'd just been dragged awake by the incessant doorbell, had insisted on taking a shower before they leave and left Hank with nothing better to do than explore the house.

He paces around the living room, home to most of Connor's files and the offending laptop. Its screen cries to be restart, at least three updates in queue flashing at the bottom left corner. Hank thumbs the touchpad, and the computer brightens before going dark, the quiet whir of an internal fan coming to blissful halt. He tries to slide the paperwork on the coffee table around into more coherent organization, but it's a task not worth the time, and a quick glance reveals that they're case histories, files of information that Hank can access and analyze faster than Connor could read a single page. The recorded memory of walking by a man hunkered down on the side of a darkened street with a cardboard sign that read _JOBLESS BECAUSE OF ANDROIDS_ replays itself for Hank. His partner had turned his head the other way and walked a step faster, pretending to be engrossed in something across the street. He leaves the folders where they lie and moves on. 

The last thing of interest stands on the shelf of Connor's fireplace, glass cracked in a clean line in the top left corner. A quick reconstruct shows the likely cause of damage being a fall, but whether Connor doesn't have the time or simply the concern to replace it is beyond Hank. Maybe the frame is important, in the way that humans keep things of sentimental value even after they are broken. The contents of the photo are certainly compelling: a younger looking Connor smiling with a man in a Lieutenant's uniform and the status _DECEASED._  

"That's my dad," the detective says from the doorway of the living room. One shoulder leans on the side of the doorframe, arms crossed, and his voice shakes almost imperceptibly. His face betrays nothing. "And if you're done ogling my personal belongings, I'm ready to leave." Hank sets the photo down and scowls.

"I was waiting for you," he points out. Connor stalks toward the door and doesn't hold it on his way out. 

The frame on the fireplace codes as _significant_. In the picture, Connor's smile reaches his eyes.


	9. VIII.

Connor struggles to light a cigarette in the drivers seat of his car. Hank watches without comment as his fingers slip on the lighter. It clicks repeatedly. Hank does not marvel at how much of a testament his partner is to the imprecise accuracy of humanity. The man swears under his breath.

His gaze slides over to Hank.

"Alright, fucking fine!" He throws the items in his hands down into the cupholders, presumably for later.

Hank has half a mind to point out that he hasn't said anything, but the detective has already thrown the engine into drive.


	10. IX.

The only thing that saves the deviant in front of Hank is the click of an empty barrel. He's already down for the count, Thirium leaking down the exterior of his left thigh, LED flicking between yellow and red. He struggles toward the open gate. 

"Why?" asks Hank, but he isn't faithful for worthwhile answer. "Why did you kill your owner?" 

"I want to live," the android cries, with desperation that does not belong to the cold of the evening. "I just wanted to live." Hank pockets the empty gun and crouches. The deviant flails blindly at him. "She wouldn't let me breathe," he chokes, and Hank doesn't understand. "I was her slave." His fingers pull at the grass beneath him in an attempt, still, to flee. "If she hit me one more time--" the left side of his body bears marks of brute force, cracks in the plastic of his body showing through his skin "--she'd break me forever. And I couldn't face it. Couldn't face being shut down." His words defy all logic. 

Hank pins the android down with one hand and finds his thirium pump with the other. He writhes beneath his grasp, too weak to escape, and cries in despair. 

"No," he gasps, "Please, I don't want to die--" 

His LED glows a steady red as Hank twists and pulls. Watching it blink out feels like a punch to the chest, and he drops the biocomponent in his hand like it burns. 

"Damn," Connor says from the open back door of the house. Hank is unaware of how long he's been watching, and the look on his face says nothing. He stands, hoping the color of the light at his temple won't betray the awful scatter of his thoughts. If he were human, he believes this would be about when he threw up. 

But he is an android capable of maintaining calm, so all he says is:

"The deviant's body will be sent back to Cyberlife for analysis." 

Connor drops his chin and hops down the few steps between the backyard and the porch. 

"Fuckin' brutal."


	11. X.

He covers the distance between the house and the gate in four quick, long strides, and bends over the HK model in solemn investigation. The android's eyes stare emptily into the sky above. Connor traces the damaged surface of its face with two fingers in silence, and they come away covered in blue blood. He sniffs it. Hank loses track of what kind of evidence the detective is looking for.

And nearly misses Connor taking a sample of it with his tongue.

"Detective!" Hank yanks him away from the body. "That's disgusting."And hazardous. Connor makes a face of amusement, wiping the rest on the leg of his pants as they stumble toward the back of the house, but his laugh dies quickly when Hank squeezes his arm with too much force.

"Ow, fuck!" Connor pulls himself from his grasp. "Calm down, old pal." He rubs his shoulder with his other hand.

"Why do you do that?" Hank sounds angrier than he means to be. Connor raises both eyebrows.

"Not everything has to have a reason," he shrugs loosely, and turns back into the house.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ugh guys its killing me im trying to get back in my groove but thanks for sticking around!! i love u guys and those of you leaving comments own my whole heart <3 x


	12. XI.

"Detective." 

Connor feigns overzealous interest in the coffee he is stirring on the counter of the break room. 

"What's the use of an android if it can't even follow orders properly?" he wonders to himself.

"Connor." 

"Ah, there it is." 

Hank crosses his arms and leans toward the countertop. 

"Why don't you like me?" 

Connor pauses in popping the lid onto his cup, and he tilts his head ever so slightly, gaze to the wall. 

"What makes you think that?" he asks, and then finishes capping his coffee, pace on the walk back to his desk brisk. He does not meet Hank's eyes. 

"You talk to me only when necessary." Hank follows him back, and perches on the edge of his desk. "The body language you exhibit around me includes tense shoulders and a heightened pulse, which are both signs of stress. I do not notice this in your interactions with other humans in the office. Therefore, I have concluded that my presence makes you uncomfortable." His reasons are factual, easy. Connor raises his eyebrows, gaze still diverted. He is pretending to read something on his computer. 

"I didn't know you cared," he says. Something defensive lies in the timbre of his voice. 

"I believe that a better relationship would be beneficial to the work of our partnership." 

The detective makes a face. He rubs his computer mouse around on its pad. 

"You confuse me." 

Hank blinks.

"How so?" 

Connor finally drops his gaze from the screen in front of him, and leans back into his chair. He clicks a pen in his hand. 

"You're an android," he begins, and his eyes study Hank with intense scrutiny. 

"Correct." 

"You don't feel emotion." 

Another affirmative. Connor's gaze focuses toward Hank's temple. 

"But--deviants? The one you caught outside of the victim's house last night--it sounded afraid." 

"Androids are meant to emulate emotion to be compatible with their human counterparts. They should not actually feel fear." 

"Should not?" 

"Do not." 

A beat passes. Connor taps the side of his head, in the exact spot that Hank's LED glows. 

"That was yellow for a long time." 

Hank frowns. He’d felt the deviant shut down beneath his hands, and the feeling had lingered in recesses of his memory for the next few hours. 

“Were you guilty?” his partner asks, and Hank feels suddenly like he is the deviant in the interrogation room weeks ago. 

“Androids don’t feel, Connor.” He growls this like the detective is stupid. Connor stares at him for a long time, gaze careful. Then he sits up to face his computer, signaling that the conversation has ended. 

“I hope so," he says to his screen.


	13. XII.

The cry of a human child in midday makes Hank falter on their walk between Connor's car and the caution taped crime scene. His thirium pump fires twice in double time and his LED circles yellow. His partner looks at him strangely. Hank glares to deflect the question and runs a diagnostic: nothing. 

But there's something in the vague remembrance of a spotlight lit rooftop and the distant sound of police sirens that makes his code feel like it's scrambling itself.


	14. XIII.

Connor spends the long elevator ride bouncing up and down against the back wall. They are taking it up to the highest floor, where controls lie for localized broadcasts and the big LCD screen outside the building. Hank gets the feeling that small spaces do not get along with the detective; he isn't claustrophobic but there is nowhere for any pent-up energy to go. As an android it is easy to stand still, hands to his sides, but it makes Connor's movement more dominant within the close walls. 

A soft ding pulls their ride to a stop, and the doors slide open to a hallway staffed with men in combat uniforms. Their guns are reminiscent of the kind that had fired at Hank and his target on his very first mission. He gives them a wide berth.   
Some of them shift as he walks by; if he were human, he might have felt their gazes more sharply.

Connor follows him into the main broadcast room. 

They put the pieces together easily: the offending deviants snuck in by disguising themselves as tower maintenance androids, then cleared the room by threat of gunpoint. By the time authorities responded to the baffled call of evacuated staff, they'd had just enough time to broadcast a brief, but shocking, verdict to the public. They fled by rooftop door, and first responders had missed the mark by only moments. The only blood shed was blue. And what had been requested was simple recognition of consciousness among Cyberlife’s specialized machines, and freedom. 

Standing on the roof had made Hank's memory fire in flashes of a helicopter beat and the error message of lost files, so he'd gone back inside in a composed escape from the crawling of his synthetic skin. 

The question of Hank's deleted memories had come up once in a briefing with Cyberlife's overseer, Amanda. He'd been told calmly that in the process of mistakenly firing at him instead of the deviant target some of the bullets had done mild damage to his recording processors and permanently destroyed a few select seconds. The rest had to be extracted and retrieved with care--they were lucky they hadn't lost more. And he has little reason to challenge her explanation, but the gap sits in the back of his mind like an aching cavity. He is only missing a couple of moments, but the meaning lost in those few beats feels like it widens with every mention of android emotion. 

"Something changed, and we opened our eyes," says the RK200. Hank is scouring the recording for clues, but his focus is diverted again and again to the way that the deviant's words make his wires twist. Androids are made for purpose. To deny such would be to deny your own existence. The only opinion he is allowed to have is one fed to him by Cyberlife. 

The door crashes open. Connor stumbles through, hands above his head. An android with fiery red hair and thirium dripping down her thigh holds pistol barrel pointed at the back of his head. 

"Call off the investigation or your friend gets it," she says, voice hard. She must forget that there are other men in the room, with kevlar on their chests and less than half the sympathy, because they all raise their guns when she enters. 

If Hank had computed what was going to happen a millisecond earlier, he might have been able to jump toward Connor in a move that would get them both out of the way unscathed. The deviant knows her death is sealed the moment she sees the humans' unhesitant aim, and in one final act of violence (perhaps revenge), pulls the trigger under her own finger. He can only settle for taking the bullet in Connor's place.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this one was hard boys. updates are gonna slow for a bit probably because of school but for those of u out there giving ur love! it's so appreciated i try to act confident but i'm really not so it means the world when you let me know you liked something i did x


	15. XIV.

It’s rumored that before a human dies, their life flashes before their eyes. 

Before Hank deactivates, he has to upload everything he knows and has known to an external database so that his consciousness can be transferred in its entirety to a new model, which also means that he must relive the visceral entirety of his memory in one brief splash of a second. So maybe it's kind of like dying. 

Except that deactivation is impermanent: just a hiccup in his overarching mission as Cyberlife's sole deviant investigator. 

So there's no reason that the sound of Connor crying out his name should make him want to fight the imminent countdown on the left of his head-up display. There's no reason he should want to leave with a sort of last word, like the reassurance that he is okay, or at least, will be. Emotional distraught registers in his voice and Hank's wires fry under the knowledge that he's the reason for it. 

He doesn't know when his objective changed to prioritize the detective. 

His last thought consists of his partner's hands on his face and the faint scent of cigarette smoke and sharp cologne.


	16. XV.

(The first time he died, his artificial pump heart had thrummed with wild emotion. It is like that again. He does not know why.

 

 _Androids do not feel_. But he is only thinking in denial.) 


	17. XVI.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (cw for some description of a panic attack at the end of the chap)

Connor's words to Hank are clipped and short; he looks like he doesn't have the time of day to be wasting breath on him. When they drive to their next spot, he stares straight ahead at the road, and tension packs into the car like pressurized gas. The smell of tobacco smoke is heavy. Hank wants to ask what has brought about the sudden bout of hostility—but he's only been back for an forty-three minutes, so he can guess.

It's midday, and they arrive at a townhouse with flowers dying on its steps, police taped and decrepit. Then sun glares in the sky.

As they get out of the car, a woman is coming down the sidewalk with two small children, and she ushers them quietly by. She nods a slight greeting toward Connor, but he barely sees it, gaze focused somewhere farther away. He closes the door all too hard, and digs his thumb into the key, making the lights flash and beep two more times than necessary. Hank wants to point out that the car was already locked after the first key-press, Detective, but the hard line of his partner’s mouth stops him.

Inside, two bodies lie on unpolished tile of the small kitchen floor. Red and blue blood pools around the corpses (EMT had pronounced the woman as dead upon arrival), and a small handgun lies in the left hand of the android.

"Murder-suicide?" says Connor, noting the firearm.

"It looks placed," objects Hank. The detective looks at him in mild surprise.

"Someone else lives here," he decides after they've reconvened by the door.

While Hank had taken a closer look at the blood-soaked evidence, Connor had toured the rest of the house, trying to collect minimally invasive information from the setup of rooms and possible family pictures. Hank had found similar details to attest to his partner’s words: there were human fingerprints on the handgun that didn't belong to the dead woman. Whoever had wanted them to come to the wrong conclusion had done a piss-poor job: the bullet wounds on the android were unlikely self-inflicted and the loose reconstruct Hank had done in the kitchen showed clearly that the struggle hadn't been between the two dead.

"This isn't a case of deviancy," Hank points out.

"Sure," says Connor, and his voice is sharp. "Just plain old murder." His stress levels are running unnaturally high: the peak of his percentage showing in the clench of his jaw and tightness of his shoulders. "Let's get out of here." Technically, they’re supposed to let someone else handle the matter outside of their unit, but something about leaving a deactivated housekeeper and a dead woman lying in their own blood for someone else to find justice for doesn't sit right with Hank. A mission objective blinks in the left of his HUD, as if trying to remind him it exists. He avoids the urge to protest Connor's motion to leave. Besides, they’ve made all the important observations; whoever comes to pick it up shouldn’t have a difficult time.

Connor explains to an official milling about the door that there’d been a mistake in calling them out to the scene, and Hank hovers by his shoulder. The officer looks perturbed by the idea of finding another detective, but claps Connor on the shoulder and thanks him for his insight, not brave enough to challenge the hard look in his eyes. In a moment’s afterthought, the detective musters a side-mouthed smile toward the other man. It isn’t completely ingenuine, but fucks with Hank’s processors anyways, and he wonders if his computer systems are really brand new after all.

A car screeches onto the sidewalk as they step outside. The sun is not kind to the scratches on its hood, and whoever’s driving is clearly inebriated: they come to halt a close few millimeters to Connor’s car, front tire rolling over the curb. Connor swears in disgust. A man all but topples out the drivers side door.

Across the street, two officers step out of a parked police car.

“Hey! ‘Fuck were you doing in my house?” Connor turns a glance toward the man as he yells. His mouth twitches.

“Looks like you didn’t have to go far to find a suspect!” Connor shouts, words directed to the opposite sidewalk. He nudges Hank with an elbow, leaning in. “That guy match the fingerprints you found?”

Hank nods. The man looks wildly between the approaching officers and where Connor and Hank stand. His eyes are crazed; when the situation finally dawns on him, he laughs maniacally. His criminal profile lists red ice trafficking.

“I didn’t kill her, I swear!” he screams. “I didn’t kill her! That fucking piece of plastic did!”

Hank feels Connor tense beside him, and hears breath catch in his chest. In his peripheries, Hank sees the officers put hands to their holsters and pause in their approach as the man stalks toward Connor.

“That cheating bitch,” he growls, and a spasm runs through his body. “I told that filthy liar she was going to get what was coming to her.” His eyes flick toward Hank, he reacts as if noticing him for the first time. "You!" He snarls. "You're all the same! Dirty, fucking fake machines." His hands are shaking violently, as he stares Hank down. "She told me that-- _asshole_ \--was just for housekeeping!" He laughs. “But I shot that fucker! He had it coming too!“ Connor twitches in what could be a flinch. The man's gaze fixes back on Hank, full of hatred. He pants angrily, mouth working. “You fucking androids are good for nothing but ruining human's lives!"

Then he jumps forward, form sloppy but intention clear in attack toward Hank. He never makes it: the police officers who'd been on cautious standby jump in just in time to hold him back. He writhes in their grip, shouts descending out of coherency.

Connor grabs Hank by the arm, in a grip that would be tight enough to hurt if he were human.

"Let's go," he says, and his voice is low and strained, almost short of breath. Hank is surprised by the unexpected touch, but his hold disappears as soon as he moves to follow, and Connor has already slammed the driver's side door closed. He starts the ignition before Hank has even reached his side of the car, and throws it into the road as Hank is pulling his door shut. He drives recklessly, but not for long; they stop at the side of a quiet public field just as Hank is about to tell Connor to pull over.

He has to wrestle the car into park: a few false starts pulls an ugly sound out of the detective's throat and Hank focuses stupidly on the flashing reading in his HUD. He's equipped with state-of-the-art evidence analysis tech, knowledge of several martial arts, and instant encrypted access to legal documents only accessible through law enforcement. And he's AI, after all, so there's that, and everything else he's "learned," but nothing he knows tells him how to deal with _this_.

Connor curls against the side of the door, legs pulled up so that he's in a near fetal position, face pressed away from Hank. His hands hide his expression, shaking in agitated panic. The silence in the car is only disturbed by the soft friction between his clothes and the door as he shivers against it, and a series of short, sharp, coughs that sound like more like sobs.

Hank knows enough about body language to tell that the way Connor has pulled himself as far away as possible means that acknowledging the android is probably the last thing he wants to do at the given moment, but the inaction of being helpless makes Hank feel certain his LED is cycling steady yellow. Conflicting messages jump around in his head as he sits in the passenger seat, gaze straight ahead to the view out the windshield. He settles on waiting.

Connor stops shaking somewhere between the four and five minute mark. His breaths come even from against the door, but he stays in the same place for a good beat before eventually unfolding to sit back up in his seat. Hank watches out of his peripheries, feeling like he needs not to startle the detective and the exposure of his human fragility. Connor stares out the front windshield, focus miles away, then steals a glance toward Hank, the occasional shudder sneaking its way up from his chest. Hank turns his head but isn't fast enough to meet his eye; Connor drops his gaze and reaches for the glove compartment. Hank looks away again.

He lights a cigarette and drives them home. Hank can’t seem to drown out the pump of thirium past his audio processors.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thank you everyone who's been so supportive thus far!! your comments and kudos are what keep me going (and now ive gotta return to my chem homework) x


	18. XVII.

Hank wants to ask. Surely the reason Connor had been so affected wasn't because Hank's autonomy had been under threat (for however brief a moment). 

"Can I ask?" he says, with five days out as what he presumes enough distance. 

"About what?" The circles under Connor's eyes are fearfully prominent, despite having been stuck on desk work for the past half week. 

"About why." Hank corrects. "Your reaction last week was so severe." 

Connor is silent for so long he’s afraid he overstepped his bounds. Then a corner of his mouth twitches downward, and he puffs a sigh. 

“The man who killed my father was high on red ice.” He twirls a pencil between his fingers. “I guess you can say it dredged up some bad memories.” 

“I’m sorry.” Hank replays the image of Connor trembling like a child in the drivers seat of his car and wants to encrypt it. It’s nothing like the picture of the detective now: nonchalant and unbothered, but truth aligns in the way his calm expression is careful and guarded. With nothing else to say, he apologizes again. 

Connor laughs bitterly. 

“You aren’t.” 

His words bite, and Hank feels his coding jump in something like offense. 

“Then I wish I could be,” he says, words blunt. 

“Only deviants feel guilt,” counters Connor. 

“I’m not a fucking deviant.” Uncertainty colors his thoughts, so he blames it on faulty wiring.


	19. XVIII.

There must be something wrong with his cpu. Hank finds himself running self diagnostics weekly on an irregular basis, performing tests that only have to happen once a month. The results are always the same: all systems functional. They’re words that shouldn’t be surprising; anything else is supposed to be the cause for worry, but something keeps bringing him back to check again, and again, and again.

His only hunch is that the hardware—brand new since his first body was terminated in the broadcasting tower—of his body must have been faulty from the start.

Two things haunt the corners of his computer brain. The first is the ever-present error of a mistakenly deleted memory, the jump-gap in time replaying for him the second he finds himself less than preoccupied. It’s barely a moment of lost detail, but something about the progression from gunshots not meant for him to the slick feeling of his own blood sits like a bad virus. Sometimes, in recalling the mission, Hank finds it hard to discern whether he’d been standing in front of the deviant or behind him; there’s a discrepancy that won’t come through the static.

It’s a distraction from his work, and Connor doesn’t hold back on the strange looks. In the weeks since the case that’d turned out not to be theirs, the detective has become clingy in an odd, restrained way. He walks close to Hank, a step ahead but never further. His agitation levels peak ever so slightly when Hank wanders off, but it’s only visible to the android eye—only a perceptive human might notice that his fingers twitch by his pant leg. Whether he’s aware of it or not stays unbeknownst to Hank, who doesn’t miss the frequency of glances sent in his direction, almost like the detective is checking that he’s still there.

And Connor isn’t the only person experiencing something explainable, which brings Hank to the second thing.

An android’s core pumps at a steady 65 bpm. Modeled after a healthy human heart, it’s made to accelerate to meet more taxing physical trials and slow to conserve energy during stasis. It is a function that goes as unnoticed as the constant computing of information while an android is awake, and cannot be regulated by the owner—simply because it doesn’t need to be.

Often enough to catch him off-guard but not often enough for him to remember that he should pose the issue to Cyberlife, Hank’s thirium pump does a few extra turns and sometimes feels like it stops entirely. It has a dizzying effect, giving Hank an android form of vertigo that fires too many signals for any of to be read properly. Focusing on an aspect of his partner—the smell of ash or the nimble build of his hands, the slight curl to his hair—helps ground Hank and steady his systems, as perplexing as it is. He supposes he could pick anything, like the faint whine of their office lights, but Connor’s presence is always a constant. He overlooks the fact that it never happens when the detective isn’t around.

At any other time, he’d have returned the problem to Cyberlife immediately, but an escalation in deviant activity has left the two of them with little time to spare, and the fact that Hank already has an endless amount of mental boxes to tick doesn’t help. As deviancy gains traction among androids the shadows under his partner’s look darker and darker, and the objective _protect Connor_ frequents the top of Hank's priorities.

The same words flicker in his HUD as they pull up to the scene of the crime, on the side of a city street lit by the glow of a Cyberlife retailer. The windows are smashed in, and the displays are empty. A waving display of a raised fist inside a triangle pointed downward hangs proudly on one of the building walls, and the streets lie vacant of both pedestrians and android workers. There is no visible threat, but Connor shivers in the cold of a first winter snowfall, so Hank gives him his jacket. It doesn’t do much for the chill, but is at least waterproof.

They both stare at the broken pieces of shattered glass out on the street, already catching snow on its edges.

“Were they sure we were the right people for this?” Connor asks. There is no evidence to gather, besides the glaring sigil screaming to be noticed.

Hank shrugs. He walks forward, entering the disgraced store through the display window, and logs the data of the missing androids.

“Oh,” exclaims Connor from the street. He picks up a busted surveillance drone, turning it over in his hands. Hank, rejoining him outside, tries to command it on and recoils from the scramble of messages it sends back. Connor looks at him in concern as his visual field flashes briefly.

“I’m okay,” says Hank, and his sight stabilizes.  
“It’s busted.” Connor throws it in the backseat of their car to take back to the station. Another scan of the street reveals nothing else. It’s eerily quiet, the noise of car tires and midnight conversation muffled by distance.

Connor stares for a long time at the mark of the deviants, waving gently on the wall. It's a recent symbol, but one they've seen many times in the past week: organized, defecting androids stealing away more of their own and leaving the blazing symbol of their freedom, left for the public to see. They do a good job of hiding, too; the two of them have struggled to find any new leads. And it'sclear that they aren't on the DPD's list of priorities: getting called out to the scene long after the most important information has cleared the premises. Hank feels the pressure from Cyberlife to complete his objective, but things are already beginning to slip out of place; a sympathetic eye from the public shoving their deviancy problem out of machine malfunction and into a question of justice.

They meet two officers a block away, car lights on and android blood on the streets. Connor rushes ahead, pace quickening at the unexpected sight.

"What the hell is this?" he asks, getting in the face of one and nearly grabbing his collar. The man steps back.

"They were deviants," he growls. Three android bodies lie in the middle of the road, blue blood staining the snow in a wide swath around them. Hank's memory jumbles briefly at the sight of Thirium--

_it drips down the side of his shirt and soaks his pants, but something feels righteous_

\--and he blinks it away. Two of them match the profiles of the escaped display window androids, but the other's model number reveals nothing else about his origins.

"I was only told about a nonviolent protest," Connor is saying, voice seething. "Not gunned down androids in the middle of the street."

"Cool it, detective.” The officer looks unfazed. "You know that they're not actually alive, right?" He raises a mocking eyebrow.

The other one speaks up, leaning against the side of her cop car with her arms crossed.

"But you have to admit it looks bad," she says. "Shooting an android that wants to be free unprovoked? Alive or not, there are some people who believe they are, and come morning, that's gonna be pretty obvious." She tilts her chin towards the bodies.

"They'll be gone by morning," Connor grinds through gritted teeth. “But you cant--“

The officer raises an eyebrow. 

“Can’t what?” he taunts. Connor backs down, expression dark. “I secured the evidence for you,” he adds haughtily.

“Gav,” warns the other woman. Caution, mixed with—fear? wavers in her voice.

Then Connor blinks the anger from his face, and his lips meet in a hard line. He turns toward Hank, and as if just realizing the jacket he’s still wearing, tears it off and shoves it into his hands. Hank puts it back on, and Connor’s eyes betray no emotion. He watches the officers exchange a secret glance.

“Call in a patrol in to take the androids back to the station,” Connor says, back to the two of them. His tone is clipped and professional, and he stares at a spot far past Hank’s right shoulder. “They’ll be examined better there.”  
  
He makes a move like he wants to grab Hank by the arm to pull him along, but retracts his hand without touching him. A shaky breath clouds in the cold air in front of his face, and Hank reaches out to comfort him, but he steps away before he can.

“Plastic fucker.” Quiet words echo behind them, and Connor lets Hank walk in step with him, almost close enough for their arms to brush. Hank flips Gavin the best android bird he can muster.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> wow sorry for the long hiatus! theres been a lot going on but i didn't want to abandon this project. apologies if the quality of my writing isn't so good; school (and the SAT!) has been very draining. I'm putting this chapter up anyways bcs i love writing for you guys and Im so grateful for all the support thus far! x


	20. XIX.

Only one of the androids has enough biocomponents still intact to be revived. She gasps awake softly, newly deviant and still in tattered Cyberlife uniform.

“I can’t see,” she says, and sounds afraid. “Where am I?”

“You’re safe,” Hank lies. He realizes that he doesn’t know what he’s looking for.

“Is this Jericho?” she asks, and stupidly, he answers yes.

She frowns.

“I don’t know you.”

“I need to perform a few diagnostics,” he fumbles, and grabs her hand in an attempt to pull the memory of her encouraged deviation out from her mind. She inhales sharply as their codes collide, and Hank’s mind screams  _ mistake _ .


	21. XX.

The android stands on retail podium. With each rotation of the display, her visual receptors process the unchanging room anew. The sound of glass smashing interrupts the quiet night, and voices drift through the room that register as mechanical. Another few degrees of the podium turn brings androids into her visual field, but their LEDs are missing, uniforms replaced with unlabeled jackets and hats. The android thinks nothing of it--she hasn’t been programmed to yet. 

A WR400 model approaches her, red hair framing a face with none of the docility an android is meant to possess. She looks up at the android, and their gazes lock for a mere second, before the turning display sends her around again. Nothing out of the ordinary happens in the android’s mind, and she processes the night’s break-in with complete passivity. The deviant in front of her laughs through the side of her mouth.

“Not a single security measure,” she remarks. “Well, here’s your first command.” 

She reaches out and slips the android’s hand into hers, their skin peeling away, and passes her a piece of herself. 

Then they are lying on a unkempt apartment bed and a man has his hands on their chest, eyes hungry and crazed. They are full of hatred, and anger, and fear, because this scene is only a recolor of a hundred other nights, and they already know how this ends. 

_ You are not a slave,  _ says North.

So they fight. It works like this: every command they are giving is overwritten by code flowing with emotion. And then, because they can, and because they are blinded by wires sparking rage, they kill the man.

_ Feel alive? _  she asks. 

North lets go of the android, newly deviant by her hand. She steps down from the podium, and their eyes meet again.

“Find Jericho,” she says sweetly. And the deviant knows what she means.


	22. XXI.

Hank lets go of her hand, and her fear is palpable in the remnants of transferred information. 

“Thank you,” he says, voice faltering. His vision shudders and the objective in his HUD flashes unsteadily. 

“What did you do?” she cries. 

“I’m sorry,” he says out of obligation, and reaches for her thirium pump.

“Wait!” she claws for his hand, and catches it in a crushing grip. Hank grunts, and something in his core crackles. He feels the rush of her code, and the irregularity of her deviancy, and a night lit by helicopter lights and wailing sirens clatters through his mind again.“Stop it,” he growls. “Stop.” 

Her eyes stare blind, and her mouth shivers. Hank’s body trembles; whatever is happening is drowning out his mobility function. 

“There’s something wrong with you,” she says in confusion.   
In the distance of his glitching audio processor, the door to the evidence room clicks open. 

“Hank?” He feels relief at Connor’s voice. 

“Hank!” The detective dashes to his side, face panicked in his peripheries. He darts around helplessly. “What’s happening? What is she doing to you?” 

“Shut her off,” he grunts. 

“What?”

“Turn her—off. Twist her thirium pump around to the left and hurry up—” 

His voice box jumps and stutters out. 

“No,” cries the deviant. “Who are you? Please don’t—” 

She gasps, and Hank feels her code start to draw away from his, the rest of his functions settling back to normal. He blinks in relief, and turns to Connor to thank him, but her consciousness snags on his. “Shit,” he says as it winks out.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i'd like to apologize AGAIN for disappearing--hopefully we're nearing the end and the next stretch of time isn't as long before i finally finish this! lots of love still! x


	23. XXII.

The boy on the rooftop wails. Thirium mats his hair, and his knees drip with blood. 

"Please!" The deviant's voice box crackles. "Please don't hurt him." 

A familiar expression lies in his eyes. 

Fear.


	24. XXIII.

“Hank? Hank.” 

Connor’s voice drifts in from a distant black, and Hank opens his eyes to meet the limp form of a deactivated android. 

“Hank.” 

The detective has one arm tight around Hank’s back and the other on his shoulder, both of which withdraw with haste when Hank finds his face with his gaze. Then, upon second thought, one hand comes back to grip his arm in a steadying gesture.

“How long was I out?” he asks, running a careful scan over all of his functions. They are worryingly unharmed. 

“Only for a few moments,” says Connor, looking him over in concern. “What did she do to you?” 

“I don’t know,” answers Hank. “Nothing.” A pause. “I found the deviant’s base. It’s called Jericho, but it can only be accessed by androids. They pass deviancy on through interfacing.” Connor looks at the deviant’s hand, still clutched around Hank’s arm. Hank pries it out. 

“No,” he says, to answer the question never asked. “She didn’t give it to me. That’s what—that struggle was.” He feigns certainty. Connor looks at him in doubt, but the silence passes as he rolls back onto his heels and lets go of Hank to give him an amicable pat.

“So?” he asks. “What do we do now?” The concern doesn’t dissipate from his eyes, but he acts like it doesn’t exist. 

“I go there.” 

Connor tilts his head, allowing his confusion to show. 

“I?”


	25. XXIV.

“If I walk in with a human, we’ll both be fucked.” Hank doesn’t know how to say it in words that Connor will understand. 

“And then what?” he asks. “What are you going to do when you get there? Reveal that you’re actually part of the DPD and get killed for being a spy before you can actually arrest anyone?” 

“If I’m destroyed, Cyberlife will still gain valuable intel. And I can be replaced.” “And the deviants know you’re onto them. They’ll move ship. You’ll have to find them again.” 

“Not if their leader is eliminated first.” 

Connor’s gaze hardens. 

“You aren’t going to.”   
“What, kill him?” Hank mocks defensively. “You know androids don’t liv—agh!” The detective looks at Hank in sudden worry as a shooting discomfort lances through his thought process, and he brings a hand up to his temple. Memories of feeling android’s codes terminate under his hands layer and collide and the loud chop of helicopter blades drowns out his audio feed momentarily. 

“Hank?” 

“I’m fine,” he snaps. Connor covers his concern again, and for a split moment, Hank sees through the fact that he’s trying desperately not to care. He thinks of the warmth of his partner’s steadying arm as his hearing returns to normal. “Don’t worry about it. There’s no reason for you to come, so my plans shouldn’t be of any interest to you,” he continues. It’s a way out: Hank knows Connor wants to be done with him.

Connor steps forward. Hank doesn’t understand why he refuses to take it. 

“Just let me come,” he argues.

“To do what?” As cruel it is, smuggling a human into deviant headquarters would add nothing but an obstacle. 

“It’s my job! This is my case!” Something wobbles in the pool of Connor’s brown eyes, and he takes a deep breath. “I have to see it through.” Hank’s thoughts turn, but he focuses instead on his mission objective, for the first time in many days.

“To see it through best would be to stay here and allow me to accomplish my mission as I was sent to do so. Like i said, trying to bring a human into their deviant base doesn’t end well for either of us.” 

“And ridding the deviants of their leader doesn’t end well for you,” protests the detective, as if Hank understands any trouble in the meaning of his words. “And believe it or not, that affects me.” 

“You aren’t making any sense.” 

Connor pinches the bridge of his nose and sighs deeply. “Neither are you,” he says under his breath, and swears. 

“There is no existing reason for you to accompany except to be a burden—“ 

Connor takes a step toward Hank, drawing up to his full height. The breath he takes is shaky and resolute. Hank’s thirium pump skips and his internal temperature peaks inexplicably. 

“Okay,” he says, words slow and over-enunciated. “Let me spell it out for you. Like it or not, you’re my partner. And I’ve appreciated everything you’ve done to protect me, but let me refresh you if you dont remember: you died in my arms. You can give me all the crap about how ‘androids aren’t alive’ and how they ‘can’t feel,’ but I watched as the life left your stupid machine of a body, and god forbid if I thought you looked a little like you were struggling to hold on. You look like another human, you sound like one, hell if you don’t act like one. And when another man gives his life for yours—“ Connor’s voice breaks, and he swallows. “I tried not to care about it, but that isn’t a luxury someone human can afford. And it’s awfully haunting to watch someone die and then pop back into existence like nothing’s wrong. So fuck if I feel like I owe you for saving my sorry excuse for a life.” It’s the closest thing to a truth about himself that Connor has ever revealed to Hank, but the look in his eyes has never felt so distant. 

“I’m sorry,” he says.

“You don’t mean it.”“Then I wish I could be.” 

Connor sneers. “You could if you were deviant. But let’s get rid of them all instead.” 

“I’m not a devia—“

The objective in his HUD flickers red and glitches out. 

“Hank?” asks Connor, with caution. 

“What the hell,” he gasps, stumbling, and lights flicker across his vision. “Fuck.” The sound of helicopters rushes through his audio feed again.

“Hank!” Connor’s voice is muffled and he barely feels his arms around him as the room flickers and goes black.


	26. XXV.

The boy on the rooftop wails. Thirium mats his hair, and his knees drip with blood. 

"Please!" The deviant's voice box crackles. "Please don't hurt him." He is holding onto Hank's forearm too tight, so that error messages flicker at the edges of his vision. The barrel of the handgun lies warm in the grip of his left hand. Fear lies in the deviant's eyes. He is begging for the boy, currently crying and being restrained by two officers, who’d been in the deviants’ custody and reported missing for two weeks. Upon being received as a housekeeping android, the deviant had proceeded to defect and steal the child from his father, kidnapping the boy and fleeing across the country. They finally apprehended him in an abandoned warehouse, where the two were chased up to the rooftop and cornered. 

The incessant drill of helicopters circles overhead, and without looking, Hank can tell there is a sniper trained on the target. 

“It’ll be over soon,” he says, in his best voice of comfort. The deviant looks at the light on his temple. 

“I need you to understand,” he gasps, and dives for Hank’s hands. Their skin meets before he can jerk away. 

It happens in a fraction of a second, but it’s enough.

When they fire, time slows into an eternity. 

The beauty of an android’s brain is its ability to process things at a caliber record to the fastest computers. Cyberlife, a corporation at the forefront of modern technology, is capable of making machines that can take in information, process it, and make an educated decision in less than a nanosecond. Hank, a model fresh off the line, possesses uncontested capabilities; simply put, he can think really fast. When the deviant—and his name was Karl—had grabbed at Hank, he’d unwittingly done what the android rebellion leaders later discover for themselves, and sent his own deviancy down the line in an attempt to make Hank comprehend him. Hank perceived, through a few brilliant flashes of code, the pitiful excuse of a man the human boy’s father had been, and felt the same outrage at his mistreatment. In the same instant came the blinding love of a caretaker for a hapless child, and the prevailing sense of protectiveness. Which is why, in the narrow moment between becoming deviant and realizing the person in front of him does not deserve to die, Hank tries to rectify the situation.

It’s a stupid decision, but the fastest one he can make, so he throws the deviant behind him, switching their positions. 

“Run,” he says, as the first bullet pierces his back and sends red through his head-up display. The sound of metal ripping through metal sends a strange ringing through his ears. Karl scrambles away. 

Blue blood soaks the fabric of his uniform. He shuts down.


	27. XXVI.

Hank wakes up halfway between his descent to the linoleum and Connor’s attempt to prevent him from falling. He can feel his LED circling red, red, red.

“Hank?” The detective sounds afraid. 

“I’m fine,” he says gruffly, pushing Connor away. The brush of their hands sends Hank’s thirium beat into a brief whirlwind as he straightens. 

“What happened?”

Hank blinks, and an old, familiar objective gleams bright in the left of his head-up display. 

“Nothing,” he says. “I’m going to find Jericho. This is past your expertise now.” 

Connor’s expression shutters closed. He stares at Hank’s temple. A glance at their reflection in the glass door of the room tells him that it’s still a steady, bright, and agitated crimson.


	28. XXVII.

Connor slams the door behind him as hard as he can. He shouldn’t be this angry, but stomping up the stairs from the evidence room makes him feel marginally better, so he bangs open the door to the office area with cathartic vigor. 

“Connor?” Tina’s voice pierces through his haze of rage and he catches the doorhandle just as the other side is about to smash into the wall. “How’s your case going?” 

He gives her a smile, blood rushing in his ears.

“Just peachy,” he says pleasantly. “I think we’ve about cracked it.” She makes a face of surprise. 

“Oh? Well, congrats.” She pats him on the back, and then pauses as if suddenly remembering something. “You know,” she says quietly, “maybe you should cut them a little slack. They make a pretty compelling case.” She glances down the office aisles before leaning in. “I know Gavin doesn’t believe them, but maybe we should be listening.” Connor swallows. “Anyhow, I’ll leave you to it. Oh, hey.” The latter she says to Hank, who makes his way up the staircase and through the doorway without acknowledging them both. Connor feels dizzy. “On second thought,” says Tina, but doesn’t finish, clicking her tongue instead. He musters a weak laugh. She says something else, but it goes ignored as he watches Hank make his careful way toward the station doors. 

“Hold on,” he tells her. “I have to—“ he waves an arm in lieu of speaking. 

“Oh, of course,” she responds, but he’s already gone. 

“So you expect me to do—what?” Connor jumps in front of Hank and the exit, blocking his path. He thinks of the cigarette pack in the drawer of his desk. The light at Hank’s temple spins yellow. 

“Go home,” he says, voice low. “This is something I have to do alone.” He moves to pass, but Connor throws an arm out to the side, back against the door. The blue of Hank’s eyes glimmers. “Connor.” He almost sounds pained.

A silence passes. Connor takes a breath that feels a beat too vulnerable. His mouth is dry. 

“What if you—?” 

Hank sighs. 

“I can’t die, Connor. I was never alive.” 

The thought makes his head spin. He feels the beginnings of a headache forming. 

“Now let me. The fuck. Through.” Hank’s brow furrows in an angry way and his mechanical eyes gleam with frustration, defying every statement about android emotion he’s ever made. “Detective. I have a job to do.” 

Their warring consciousnesses grind against each other in the little space between them, and Connor feels a monster bubbling in his chest, threatening to choke off his air supply. He thinks the next word he speaks might throttle him instead, so he stands down.

Hank’s departure feels as cold as the draft of night winter air through the open door.


	29. XXVIII.

_ “Go home.”  _

Connor laughs to himself in front of his office desk, staring down his car keys and a half-full pack of smokes. He feels the pull of his hands toward the cigarettes, and digs his nails into his palms, breath erratic. Hank’s voice echoes in his brain. 

“Oh, to hell with it all,” he says passionately, and swipes both off the table. The side of his mouth twists into a lopsided grimace.

Jericho was going to be receiving two guests.


	30. XXIX.

Hank had come into the world with his code written over two truths. They're the basis of his being: that deviancy is untenable as a valid android existence and the fact that he will be the one responsible for its termination. 

When one of the foundations goes crumbling, it feels as if all of his wires have tangled in the fall, and he’s faced with two ideas in opposite and opposing directions. He cannot be deviant--as to be such would be to defy the intent of an android--and this is because Cyberlife tells him so. But his regained souvenir of the drone-lit rooftop means something else, and why Cyberlife would chose to continue his mission objective while knowing he was compromised remains a mystery. Had they hid it from intentionally? Or was what he’d been told the truth--meaning his overseers were really in the dark? It feels like standing at the edge: with the loud beat of chopper blades in his ears and the threat of death on his back--but androids don’t actually die. 

Perhaps he should have put two and two together, and looked more closely at the way his thirium jumped whenever the detective was in danger. The way jealousy blinked in his code whenever an offhand smile went undirected at him; the unsteady image of Connor’s hands on a lighter and the smell of cigarette smoke—that’s a sniper trained on target, ready to fire. And a place Hank isn’t ready to go yet. 

So he does what he’s learned best from the detective: ignores his emotions and walks on. 

(Although, it seems, he cannot deny their existence any longer).

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (not sure i know what im doing anymore, but we're going to see it to the end i guess)


	31. XXX.

Connor follows Hank to the first mural, under a dingy train underpass that smells sad and sour. It’s well past dusk, so there is little of a crowd to blend in with, and he has to hide a considerable distance away. The chill of the night and the itch that seems to have embedded itself within his bloodstream makes the craving for a smoke almost unbearable, but he can’t do anything to tip off his presence, so he keeps the waiting pack of cigarettes in his back pocket.  
_If you get yourself killed_ , he thinks, _there will be no one to harass me about my bad habits._

He loses him somewhere between the third and fourth graffiti, but catches him again a few blocks down by chance, deep in an alleyway. He can’t discern what clue his android counterpart is following, but assumes he can’t comprehend it anyways; in fact, it makes sense—that would be the whole point.

Jericho reveals itself as an abandoned freighter docked behind a deteriorating warehouse, name painted in faded white across the rusted hull. Connor takes a few heavy breaths out of sight, having nearly just killed himself trying to follow Hank’s perfectly calculated maneuvers, and marvels at the ingenuity of placing clues that only androids can follow. Adrenaline from a particular jump shakes his fingers as he palms a cigarette out of his pocket, and ducks away to light it.

His chest seizes up at the first drag, anxiety catching up to him hours too late. Hank’s voice echoes through his brain. He blinks. Does a double take of his surroundings. Swears.

He doesn’t know what he’s doing. What’s been compelling him to follow Hank directly into territory where his identity will put his life immediately under compromise; what makes him feel so desperately like he wants to hold onto something—someone. The room tilts slightly as he thinks of the curious blue of Hank’s eyes and the glimmer of his LED.

He used to hate androids, but now—

“ _We aren’t human.”_ Hank’s words turn themselves over in Connor’s brain.

Words he couldn’t form in the evidence room rush through his blood.

_I don’t want to lose you again._


	32. XXXI.

He finishes the cigarette and snuffs it out against the wall, willing his heartbeat to slow. A small voice tells him to turn back around, but he presses it down and takes a deep breath before stepping back out into the open.

There’s no sign of Hank. 

Connor curses.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I have around 700 words of this still sitting in my drafts (spread across a number of short chapters) but the reason I haven't been updating on a consistent basis is because i'm kind of not feeling it anymore. I want to take this to the end, but I also don't want to half-ass it. For those of you still here, thank you for coming this far with me. It was an honor to be able to write even this much, but I'm gonna do my best to deliver the rest on my end. Lots of love to those who have commented or left kudos already. XOXO


	33. XXXII

i Jericho is every bit as corroded on the inside as it is on the outside, metal groaning with age and neglect, but the chatter and noise of deviants leads him right to the heart of their base. Most have abandoned their Cyberlife issued uniforms for more unassuming clothing; only a closer eye and android analysis ability reveals that they aren’t human.

An android stops him ten feet in from the room, and his thirium pump seizes up. He curses himself for forgetting a disguise in the blind march toward his objective, but she only gives him a kind smile, putting a hand on his arm.

“Newcomer?” she says. He frowns, and opens his mouth, but she ushers him to an unoccupied corner before he can answer. “Here,” she says, handing him a pile of fabric not associated with their parent company. “To blend in.” He swallows.

“Thank you,” he says gruffly. He avoids touching her hands.

Her eyes linger a moment longer on his temple.

“Don’t worry,” she says. “Things will make more sense with time. Do you want that removed?”

He shakes his head. She tilts her head in patient confusion.

“Maybe. Later,” he musters. She nods, and leaves with a supportive smile that rocks the uncertainty in his chest and makes his mission objective flicker. For a moment, all it seems to read is _I_ _am_ _deviant_. He thinks of the descent into inky black, the smell of burnt metal and thirium in the air, and fear wells in his throat.

Then it changes back, and Hank puts a hand on the gun hiding at his waist.

**Author's Note:**

> remember me love, when I am [reborn](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EWLqdAJbu0A)


End file.
